Born of Sand (Tales of a Dying Star Book 5) (27 page)

The heat of Saria on her face never felt so good.

Mira fell next to Kari, panting with effort. Two dark figures stood in the distance, outlined by the sun. Farrow and Geral.
They lived.
Two stingers against five, and they only suffered one casualty.
The Freemen will tell stories about this day.

If they survived that long.

Now that the fight was over, and the immediate danger gone, the memory of her mission returned. She looked down at her leg. The sand and blood formed a black crust over her entire calf, and rivulets of blood leaked out around the outside. With each second the throbbing became worse.

Mira rolled her head toward her. "You said laserfire does nothing to its armor," she said, with a note of apology in her voice. "But there's no armor over its eyes. It took me two energy clips, but..."

"You're lucky," Kari said, pushing to her knee. "Laserfire draws its attention, as you saw. And stingers rarely stand still for so long. If it hadn't just fed on Sandra's body, shooting one of its eyes out would have only made it angrier."

The reminder of their mutilated and devoured comrade wiped the smile from Mira's face. "It was a mother, trying to protect its child."

Kari grimaced as she stood. "That wasn't its child. That was its mate. The males are much smaller than the females."

"Oh."

A wave of dizziness washed over Kari. "The next... time I give... you an order..." The dunes spun in her vision, like sandy waves, rising and falling.

The sand shot forward and struck Kari in the face.

Chapter 18

Kari heard voices long before she possessed the compulsion to open her eyes. She wanted to hush them, to remain in the dream where she stood on the planet where she'd been born, arms spread, enjoying the soft Melisao rain. Her sisters Beth and Pavani ran circles around her, while her brother Alard splashed in the mud by himself.

Home. I want to be home.

Yet the voices were loud, insistent. When Kari finally opened her eyes three figures stood over her. The sky behind them had darkened to twilight.

"I know as well as you do," Geral was saying. "And I hate it, believe me. But there's nothing for us to do."

"We can wait." Farrow's voice. "As long as it shitting takes."

"That could be all night. If that stinger returns..." He sighed, as if resigned to what he had to say. "We cannot risk it. I'm not a heartless man, but we have a regimented procedure for this sort of event. We've
trained
for it."

"My answer is no."

"Farrow, man. I don't want to leave her either, but
we need to go
."

"Then go. Take Mira and return to base now. I'll wait until..."

"She's awake," said Mira.

They all tilted their heads down. Farrow smiled with immense relief. "About shitting time you woke."

Kari groaned as she pushed herself onto her elbows. Even that small motion made her head spin. They hadn't gone anywhere, judging by the stinger body some distance away. The Freemen had procedures for all kinds of emergency events, things for which they'd drilled and trained. In this specific scenario, an incapacitated comrade in the no-man's-land between Praetar City and Victory Base, standard procedure was to wait ten minutes and then leave them. Anything longer risked stingers pouncing on them, frenzied in their blood lust. Since it was now twilight they must have waited for at least an hour. Probably closer to two.
Farrow, you sentimental star-lover.
It would be a shame to capture him, later.

Capture him. The mission.

Her leg wound had been cleaned, the sand washed away and some ragged bandaging wrapped around. Seeing it summoned the pain, a pulsing, fiery burn that ran from her knee to her ankle. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sensation, and very nearly passed out again, only maintaining consciousness by sheer will.
My right thigh
. There was a mechanical injection point beneath the skin, carved out in the thigh muscle, where
shades
could activate a painkiller. But not while her comrades stood around watching.

I used it already
. She felt certain of that, though she couldn't remember when. A lifetime ago, it seemed.

Mira bent to her side and held a jug of water to her lips. The water ran down her throat like life itself, and she drank until she had to come up for air, gasping.

"How do you feel?" Mira asked.

"Alive." Looking at her comrades, none of their clothes had been torn to supply the bandage around her leg. It struck her where the extra cloth had come. She pointedly avoided glancing in the direction of the stinger, where Sandra's remains were scattered.

She needed to assess the situation. She'd been waiting for the orbital strike when the stingers attacked. Had it occurred while she was unconscious? Probably not, since Farrow wanted Geral to return to base. And they would have all been more frantic had they seen Victory Base go up in a puff of fire and smoke. So why hadn't the orbital strike launched?

"We'll take turns helping her along," Farrow said to the others. "Ten minute shifts. We'll be slower, probably eight hours until we're home. Can't risk stopping in the night, though."

Eight hours? They should have been closer than that. They were nearly to the city when the stingers...
wait
. Home. "No," Kari said. "We're not returning to Victory Base. We have to press on."

Farrow gave her a level look. "We aren't doing shit. You're in no shape to do much more than move. Once we've taken you back home, a new party will return and get the pilots."

All of it was wrong. She needed to stay with them, complete her mission. And she didn't know why the orbital strike had not yet occurred, but she sure as stars wasn't going to return and wait underneath the bullseye. "I'll only slow you down in the sand," she insisted. "Make us all one big target. A stinger'll probably breach and kill me anyways. Better to limp into town than try returning."

"You need medical attention. What the shit do you want us to do, drop you off at a peacekeeper medical station and hope they'll treat you?" He snorted.

If only you knew how plausible that truly was.
Peacekeepers would bend over backwards to assist a shade if she revealed herself to them. But she had another way. "I know a place in the city. A man named Leo runs a garage, repairing the plastics on peacekeeper vehicles. He keeps a makeshift medical room for the Praetari who have nowhere else to go. You can drop me off there on your way."
And I can raise the alarm then, and have a squad of peacekeepers arrive to finish the job. Leo's cover is worth sacrificing, for this.

Farrow shook his head. "That's all fine for you, but we're down to only three men. That's not enough to get inside the palace cells, especially with only small weapons. I'd rather take the risk on the sand."

"Three is plenty, just to sneak inside. Stars, Mira eyed a stinger." The small woman blushed. "Two extra bodies won't make a difference. If the alarm is raised, you're all dead regardless."

She could tell Farrow wasn't buying it. He was about to stop listening entirely if she didn't make a convincing argument.
Leo will hate me, but...
"And besides," she said, "Leo has a cache of weapons. Rifles and grenades. Three properly armed Freemen are better than five armed poorly."

That pierced Farrow's stubbornness. He chewed it over with Geral, speaking softly so that Kari couldn't hear. She'd made her case, couldn't think of anything else to say. Involuntarily, her hand went to the pistol on her hip.
If they insist on taking me back, I'll have to do it here.
A blast to the chest would fell Geral instantly, but how could she safely disarm both Farrow and Mira if she could barely stand?
Threats and harsh language.
It'd worked for her before.
I had two working legs before, though.

"Three rifles?" Farrow asked. "And two grenades apiece?" When Kari nodded, he sighed and said, "It'll be worth it for sure, having the weapons waiting in the city. I'm not sure how we'll pick you up after we get the pilots, but we'll figure that out along the way. We march on."

Getting her to her feet proved to be an ordeal--her leg had stiffened after sitting for so long, so simply bending the knee the first time felt like razor blades slid around behind the kneecap, though after that first bend it became progressively easier. She nearly fainted again once she was vertical, and Mira commented on how pale her face looked. But after a few minutes to ensure she could remain conscious they began moving east. Each of them took a turn helping Kari, wrapping an arm around her waist so she could limp along without putting too much weight on the wounded leg. She could bear weight fine, she soon realized, it was just her calf muscle that refused to work. She used her thigh muscles to carry her leg forward and then drop it down, like some puppeteer maneuvering a wooden figurine.

The words nearly left her lips when she remembered she was on Praetar, where they had no puppets or puppet shows, nor anything close to them for comparison.
That
would have been embarrassing, explaining both the metaphor and why she had knowledge of Melisao culture.

But worse, by being helped along Kari had no way of reaching down to her right thigh to reactivate the painkillers into her femoral artery. After a few minutes she itched to do it anyways, consequences of revealing herself be damned.

Gritting through the jolt of pain that sizzled with each step, Kari turned her thoughts back to her mission. Why had the orbital station not launched the payload? Two possibilities occurred to her. One was that the station officer had competing information that caused him to hesitate. Kari's signal was nothing more than a binary communication, notifying them of the previously-decided point in the mission: that an attack was imminent, that she was safely away, and that they were free to destroy the base. That had been decided two years before, in her initial mission briefing. A lot may have changed since then. Maybe they didn't want to destroy the base, had decided it still possessed strategic value. Perhaps they had a secondary fleet of aircraft in orbit, waiting to pounce on the base and capture as many of the Freemen as possible. The base was far enough away that it could be happening right now without Kari and her group knowing.

The other possibility worried her more. That her signal had somehow not been received at the orbital station. She'd pressed the device for three seconds, felt it vibrate in confirmation. But that could be a glitch. After two years hidden away behind a secret panel in the closet in Victory Base, perhaps it had malfunctioned. Or maybe the tech idiots had reprogrammed the orbital station computers without verifying older signals could still be received, and the signal sent from her device disappeared into a jumbled mess of noise.

If the former, then the Melisao had everything under control and Kari didn't need to worry. But if something had indeed gone wrong and they never received the signal...
they'll have no idea the attack is coming
. A
shade
among the Freemen, never discovered, and they still might attack and defeat the planet's peacekeepers without warning. And then she'd truly be stuck there, never able to return home.

It was so embarrassing, so ridiculous of a failure, that Kari nearly laughed.

So she had two goals, and unfortunately they didn't have much overlap. She needed to fulfill her existing mission and capture Farrow alive. But first, and more importantly, she had to get in contact with the orbital station to verify the original mission
was still valid at all
. If mission parameters had changed, and she captured and revealed herself to Farrow too soon, she could ruin some larger plan. It wouldn't be her fault, but she doubted the station officer would care.
Davon would love to pin a planetary failure on the Admiral's daughter,
she thought with a grimace. The backlash of that would be far-reaching.

I will use Leo's comms when we reach his garage
. And if that didn't work, then she'd just have to figure something else out.
I'll cross that dune when I come to it.